


Menagerie

by radioqueen



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Bloodplay, Canonical Character Death, Dubious Consent due to Emotionally Compromised Character(s), Dubious consent due to power imbalance, Dubiously Consensual Sex as Unhealthy Coping Mechanism, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, Forced Orgasm, Gaslighting, Hallucinations, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Metaphysical Sex, Mind Break, Mind Games, Mind Rape, Mindfuck, Monster Transformation, Multi, Multiple Orgasms, Possessive Behavior, Sex With Monster Partner Despite Being Terrified of Them, Shapeshifting during sex, Stabbing, Suicide Attempt, Warped Shows of Affection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 15:38:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17124080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radioqueen/pseuds/radioqueen
Summary: Thank you to withinadream and anysin for betaing for me!Content Warnings: Reality distortion (obviously), gaslighting, canon character death (referenced/implied), multiple self-stabbing/suicide attempts (mostly hallucinations, none successful), brief bloodplay, general psychological trauma, and noncon/dubcon of various flavors (mostly just mentioned).





	Menagerie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nelja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nelja/gifts).



> Thank you to withinadream and anysin for betaing for me!
> 
> Content Warnings: Reality distortion (obviously), gaslighting, canon character death (referenced/implied), multiple self-stabbing/suicide attempts (mostly hallucinations, none successful), brief bloodplay, general psychological trauma, and noncon/dubcon of various flavors (mostly just mentioned).

“Are you sure you’re comfortable with this?” Jonathan asked.

“I’ll have to be.” Sasha shrugged. “It isn’t as if anyone else can do the statement-taking.”

“I meant…” Jonathan pinched the bridge of his nose. “You do realize you don’t have to give a statement at all, right?”

“I need to, though.” Sasha pulled her robe tighter. “I’ve gone so long with only my own thoughts. I want to tell my story. I need to. Helen said it might be very healing, and I agree.”

Jonathan sighed. The two of them were sat at Sasha’s kitchen table. Sasha’s fingers wrapped around her coffee mug for warmth; Jonathan’s cup of tea sat untouched. Tim and Martin leaned against the counters, while Melanie and Basira lurked in the doorway of the kitchen. There was a time when Sasha might have felt overwhelmed by the idea of all her coworkers—including two she’d barely ever met—staring at her while she recounted such a personal experience, but not now. After the months (had it really only been months?) Sasha had just been through, this was nothing. Besides, she did actually feel better with their presences surrounding her.

Jonathan started the tape recorder. “Statement of Sasha James, the real one, regarding her time as a prisoner of the creature that calls itself ‘Michael,’ and her encounters with the former Helen Richardson. Statement recorded direct from subject, June 5th, 2017. Statement begins.”

Sasha felt a gentle, crackling buzz under her skin, and her mind cleared as the jumbled words pulled together into cohesion. She sat up straighter, looking Jonathan right in the eye.

“I appreciate you wording it so diplomatically, but there’s no need to gloss over the sordid details,” Sasha said. “For the past ten months or so, I was forced to pretend to be the lover of a manifestation of The Distortion that called itself Michael. And I’d just like to be very clear that although I actively participated in Michael’s fantasy, I only did so under coercion, and I have no lingering romantic feelings for him or anything like that.”

Sasha’s scalp tingled at the last sentence, and she wondered if her hair was standing on end as much as it felt like. Both women nodded supportively, almost unconsciously. Tim took a sip of coffee, and Martin fidgeted and stared down into his tea, but Jonathan didn’t waver. Sasha wondered if he could see right through her lie.

“I don’t remember anything about the events of July 29th, 2016,” Sasha went on, and the tingling eased as she spoke the truth. “That’s the night Jane Prentiss attacked the Institute and Michael abducted me. I don’t remember being present when the worms attacked, or when the Not-Them tried to disintegrate me, or anything else others have told me happened that day, but from what I’ve pieced together, Michael… rescued me from the Not-Them, I suppose.

“My fellow prisoner, Helen Richardson, told me she first found herself in a spiraling, neverending hotel corridor. But my first memory of The Distortion’s plane was when I woke up and found myself in an ordinary bed in an ordinary room in what looked like an ordinary London flat. Michael was there, holding me and sniffing my neck. I remember screaming, and then being confused when it called me by name. It told me it was my husband, Michael Shelley, and that I’d been in a terrible accident and now I lost my memories every night when I slept. Well, I might have been disorientated by nearly getting erased from history, but apparently I hadn’t forgotten the plot to  _ Fifty First Dates.   _ So I knew Michael was full of shit, but I felt too weak to fight it or escape, and I knew I needed to get my bearings. So I laid back down and let it… cuddle me, I guess is the right term. I decided to stall for time, so I asked Michael who I was, where I worked, all that stuff.

“‘You’re Sasha James,’ it said. ‘My wife.’

“‘If I’m your wife, how come I didn’t take your last name?’ I demanded.

“‘You told everyone it was an archaic, patriarchal tradition and we didn’t want to taint our marriage with that kind of thing,’ it said. ‘But the real reason was because you didn’t like the alliteration in ‘Sasha Shelley.’

“I have to admit, that did sound a lot like me. I was a bit shaken, but I persisted in asking it questions. ‘When did we get married? What was our wedding like?’

“‘We had a tiny courthouse wedding,’ it said, handing me a wedding album from our closet. ‘You wanted to wear your mother’s gown, but it was too short on you, so you wore one you found in a thrift shop.’

“It all felt too real, too much like what my real life could have been. I knew Michael was lying, but about what? I was uncertain enough that when Michael made me breakfast in bed and then seduced me right there on the toast crumbs and coffee stains, I went along with it. I’ll be honest—if I’d remembered my previous experiences with Michael, I probably would have feigned a headache. But I didn’t, and when I felt its heavy, inhuman weight on me, I realized it hadn’t answered one of my most important questions. So, while it entered me, I asked, ‘Wait, where did we meet, again?’

“‘At work,’ it said. ‘We’re both archival assistants. Do you remember our first date? I brought you lilies when I picked you up for work, and then I took you out for coffee on our way home from work.’

“‘I thought you took me to a graveyard,’ I said, surprised by my own words.

“Michael’s face lit up at that. ‘Oh, that was our second date!’ it said. ‘We did that the very next day.’

“‘My arm…’ I said, trying to remember how I’d hurt my arm on our date. ‘I got stung by a bee, didn’t I?’

“‘A wasp,’ Michael said. ‘But I fixed you.’

“‘And… where do we work again?’ I asked, because I was sure that was important for some reason.

“‘The Magnus Institute,’ it said, and suddenly all those locked-away memories rushed back.

“‘The Magnus Institute,’ I repeated. ‘Didn’t I have a major  accident at work?’

“‘Yes,’ it said.

“‘In Artifact Storage. I almost died.’

“‘Yes,’ it said again.

“‘Someone hurt me, I think,’ I told Michael. ‘But I don’t remember it.’

“‘No. And you never will,’ Michael said. ‘But I saved you, and that is the important thing to remember.’

“And when it said that, it kissed me. I remember being… surprised, because it didn’t feel human. It felt cold and hard, like a thin cushion over a rock, and I realized its hands were too long and too sharp, digging into my waist. I didn’t want to look at its grinning face anymore, so I turned my head, and in the reflection of my empty juice glass, I saw Michael’s true form.

“I screamed and tried to push it off me, but it just laughed—a little bitterly, I think—and choked me with its too-long fingers. It changed the setting, and we were suddenly in my flat. All my belongings were there, but a strange woman I didn’t recognize was using them. Michael forced my head to the side and made me watch her put on my clothes and makeup while it raped me.

“‘All your friends think that’s you,’ it said. It sort of fast-forwarded through the day, showing me this Not-me going to work, pretending to be me, living my life. And true to Michael’s words, none of you noticed the difference. ‘You’ve been replaced, and no one even realizes,’ Michael told me. ‘You belong to me now.’

“I admit, I did start crying at that. Not because I cared about ‘belonging to Michael,’ although I wasn’t exactly thrilled by that, either. It hurt too much to think about another person pretending to be me and none of you noticing. So I stopped thinking about it, and I focused on the horror of the situation I was in, and I… I don’t know why I came so hard. Maybe I was in shock. But the horror of the situation and the constant, merciless stimulation made me climax harder than I ever had before, and that frightened me more than anything else. You’re not supposed to orgasm while you’re being raped, you know? But I did. Every time.”

Sasha was shaking, and she paused to take a long drink of coffee while she re-composed herself. No one spoke, and the silence felt pitying. Sasha frowned into her mug. In the lull, Melanie grabbed the coffee pot and topped off Sasha’s mug, then her own. Sasha smiled weakly but gratefully at her. Melanie was new to the Institute staff, but Sasha had bonded with her from the first moment they’d met in the archives. They had similar senses of humor, Sasha thought, or maybe they just were both used to being the most competent ones on their teams.

Of course, Sasha knew deep down that the real reason she liked Melanie so much now was Melanie was the only human left who knew what Sasha really looked like. Even Sasha’s own parents didn’t recognize Sasha anymore. But that hurt to think about, and the pleasant buzz was working on her skin again. Sasha took another swig of coffee and focused on telling her story.

“Saying ‘no’ to anything was never really an option with Michael. Sometimes he would wait for a bit, or go away and come back, but I never got the impression that anything I said or did would have stopped him for more than maybe a day. It’s possible I could have tried harder, I suppose, but to be honest, I had fallen into a deep depression by that point. I barely cared what happened to me anymore, much less my body.

“And like I said, it felt sort of perversely good to be distracted from my usual misery with a new type of misery. I think he’d always set up a gambit where he’d win no matter what. If I played along and kissed him and pretended to love him back, I think Michael Shelley got something he needed from that. If I became scared or upset from a hallucination, Michael the monster would get a boost off feeding The Distortion. He was especially pleased if one of those hallucinations managed to make me cry during an orgasm, like he fed on my shame and humiliation and fear. Orgasms were really disproportionately important to Michael, and distressed, crying orgasms were especially good for him, I guess. Sometimes, when I didn’t cry during my orgasm, he would pin me down and use his impossibly long tongue and fingers to force me to orgasm over and over again, until my pleading and squirming and swearing finally turned to crying from fear that I would go insane if he didn't stop. And even more than that, Michael really,  _ really   _ liked when I would get upset enough to kill myself, though I tried not to give him the satisfaction often.”

There was a tense energy in the room, and Sasha shifted nervously in her chair. Jonathan was curious about what kind of hallucinations he’d made her have, and what could possibly have made her try to commit suicide. The others were curious too, but they weren’t endowed with archivist powers. A gentle pulse throbbed over the goosebumps on Sasha’s arms. Jon wanted her to go on, to elaborate. Fine, then—she would.

“I know you’re wondering, so I’ll tell you a little about the hallucinations,” Sasha said. “Michael was less complicated than I expected, at least when it came to me. From what I could tell, he mostly just wanted to have sex with me in the archives, in his bed, on a boat, on the floor of those creepy hotel corridors… It wasn’t always elaborately constructed like the first time, but he liked fucking me, especially if he could make to see me doubt reality. But the alternative was worse, so I would play along like I was Michael’s girlfriend, and he would get giddy whenever he sensed I wasn’t sure about some detail. Normally, it was just a… a game, I suppose. It was something to do, at least. I was his prisoner and I had no real say in what happened to me, so I don’t feel at all guilty about liking it, or even about orgasming every time he raped me.”

Sasha’s teeth seemed to buzz this time as she lied. But she found she was able to say the words without any trouble, and that gave her the confidence to go on.

“I didn’t mind the normal games so much, once I got used to them. But sometimes he would rape me in the middle of a scene with my parents having dinner with Not-me, or all of you out drinking and laughing without me, and I would start to, well,  _ spiral.   _ The second he found any kind of purchase in my brain like that, he would start ramping up the weirdness and trauma. I would get confused, for instance, and think I was having sex with Tim, only to realize as I orgasmed that he was actually my father, and then of course I’d realize after a brief panic attack that it had really been Michael all along. 

“All that to say, I had very little agency or sanity in that place, and sometimes Michael could be downright cruel. So when I realized I could stop a bad hallucination by killing myself in it, it became my go-to method for stopping a, I guess we could call it a ‘bad trip.’ So every few weeks, Michael would drop me into some terrible hallucination, I’d jab a knife or a shard of glass into my stomach, and Michael would pull it out and lick my wound until the bleeding stopped.

“‘Silly Sasha,’ he’d always laugh gently as his tongue sealed up my injury. ‘You could have just called for me.’

“It was… beyond dysfunctional. I realize that now. But he would always take it easy on me for a bit if I stabbed myself, so it became part of our…  _ game,   _ I suppose. If it sounds like a nightmare, well, it definitely was. But even so, I know I had it a lot easier than Helen, and you already saw what happened to her, so I guess I count myself lucky.”

Jonathan interrupted when Sasha took a breath. “You’re referring to Helen Richardson, correct? The woman whom Michael trapped in the impossible hotel corridor?”

“Yes.” Sasha tapped her fingers on her mug, ignoring the emotions stirring in her stomach as she thought of Helen. “I first met Helen… perhaps halfway through my stay with Michael? Time didn’t seem to move properly there, but if I had to guess, I’d say halfway. Anyway, she was so beautiful that I really thought she was another hallucination at first, and I wondered why Michael was having me hallucinate her. But then I touched her hands, and she kissed me, and I knew somehow that she was as real as I was. I have to say, I  _ really   _ enjoyed her normal-length fingers and tongue, and her soft, warm, normally-weighted body.” Sasha gazed into the distance, enjoying the memory for just a moment before going on. “Michael never wanted to hurt me, I don’t think. Like, when I would say, ‘Michael, please, you’re too heavy, I can’t breathe,’ he would take some weight off me. Or sometimes when he would shapeshift inside me, he would become so huge I’d scream in pain and terror, and he would inch back down to a more manageable size and kiss me in apology. Strange as it might sound, it was sort of romantic in its own weird, painful, fucked-up way.

“But Helen was so gentle and warm, and I felt like a real person again whenever we’d have sex, even if it was just for Michael’s entertainment. I know Helen fared a lot worse than I did, though, especially during sex with Michael. She didn’t want to talk much about it, but he certainly enjoyed taunting her about it. And the way she’d flinch when he’d approach her… I’m not sure why Michael was so romantic with me most of the time and so sadistic to her. Maybe because I was an archival assistant? Or maybe I was just more his physical type? I really don’t know.

“But I really think I might have gone truly, totally insane without Helen. I suspect Michael knew that, and that’s why he only put us together for the occasional threesome. At least, that was the case until we convinced him that it was such a damn shame Michael Shelley died so young and without a real girlfriend, and that in our opinion Michael Shelley could have easily wooed two pretty girlfriends like me and Helen, and wouldn’t it have been nice if Michael Shelley could have come home every day to his girlfriends warming each other up for him?”

Melanie laughed out loud at that. “Sorry! I’m sorry, just—Did that really work on him?”

Sasha grinned at her own cleverness and the absurdity of the situation, no matter how traumatic it was to think about. “It absolutely did work on him!” she said proudly. “In our defense, it took months of extremely hard work—no pun intended—and trying to conspire solely through glances during threesomes. But, monster or not, Michael  _ really   _ liked the idea of coming home from terrorizing the general population, or whatever he did during the day, and finding Helen and I 69-ing in his bed. I’m sure if I’d gone monster before I’d had a real girlfriend, I would have been the same way. Helen says his connection to his past life was his undoing, or something, so maybe his obsession with having a girlfriend was a part of that. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand it all. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Helen was already pretty broken by the time Michael let us have our full-time  _ ménage à trois.   _ She didn’t talk much, and sometimes she couldn’t bear to be touched or held, even when Michael wasn’t around. I tried to talk to her and keep her sane, and sometimes it seemed to work. But near the end, all she wanted to do was paint thin white fractals all over my naked body.  In fact, that was what she was doing when she suddenly went rigid and cried out like she was having an orgasm. I thought it was some sort of fit, like maybe she had epilepsy and hadn’t told me, but then I noticed that her body was shifting. Her hair became curlier, and suddenly she was so tall and sharp.

“I had no idea what was happening, but I was terrified. She just got up and walked right out the front door. I was at the top of the stairs when she left, so I saw that the door did  _ not   _ lead into the hotel corridors like usual. Instead, she had just stepped onto a strange foyer, then through another door. She slammed the front door behind her as she opened the other door in front of her, and by the time I opened Michael’s front door, there were hotel corridors on the other side again. I stepped just inside to peek around, to call to Helen, and when I tried to step back into Michael’s flat, I found myself in a sprawling Victorian mansion with endless trap doors, hidden passageways, and mazes. 

“I stayed there for days, but Michael never came back, obviously. I wish… I wish, in a way, that I’d gotten to see him one last time. Just for closure.” Sasha averted her gaze to her coffee cup, and once again she was narrowly able to evade Jon’s ability. “The next time I saw Helen,  _ she   _ was The Distortion. Or rather, its manifestation, she says. I still don’t fully understand everything. But this new ‘Helen’ was the one who explained everything I’d seen but not understood—The Distortion, the entities, the Not-Them, the Institute weirdness. She even showed me Michael Shelley’s transformation into Michael through her memories—his memories—its memories? It was so disquieting to start connecting all the pieces.

“I knew, logically, that my friend Helen had died, I really did, but I still found myself a bit in love with Helen’s form. We didn’t have sex or anything once she became The Distortion—stop gaping at me like that, Tim—but I’m not sure I would have said no if she’d asked. I’m not even sure I wouldn’t have liked it just as much as I liked sex with Helen as a human. I suppose ten months of hallucinogenic captivity in an astral plane will do that to a person. It doesn’t really matter though. Just a few days after her transformation, Helen suddenly appeared in front of me and opened a door for me in the hedge maze surrounding me.

“‘Your role is no longer occupied,’ she said. ‘Helen longed to see you go home to your friends. It… hurts to keep you in this cage. You may go home to your old life, if you’d like to.’

“Of course I wanted to. That’s what I’d been moping about for months, wasn’t it? So that’s how I ended up in the archives this morning. You know most of the rest, so I guess I’ll skip to what happened earlier tonight.”

Sasha could feel everyone in the room leaning in a little. She was too tired to resist, she realized. The archivist’s compulsion was tugging especially hard inside her head suddenly, and she feared she wouldn’t be strong enough to resist if Jonathan asked hard enough.

“Erm, actually, I could use a break,” she said, truthfully enough. “Tim, do you mind catching them up for a minute?”

She fled to the bathroom, splashing cool water on her face while Tim recounted driving Sasha from the Institute to her home earlier that evening.

“We just sat in the car in front of her building for a bit, talking,” Tim said. He didn’t mention the part where he’d broken down sobbing into her neck. _ “I missed you so much and now I don’t even recognize your face, even now that I’m seeing it again,”  _ he’d wept.   _ “I don’t remember your hair being black , or you being so tall, or anything else about you. That place is poison, Sasha, it’s fucking poison!”  _

“Then, after we’d talked a bit about stuff, I, ah, walked her up to her flat, and, erm, well…” Tim paused, uncomfortable.

Jonathan spoke up, his voice pulsing with power. “What happened once you reached Sasha’s flat?”

“We… we had sex,” Tim admitted. “We’d done it before, and then, there was this one night where Not-Sasha and I, well… I just wanted to try to remember her, you know? But I swear, I wasn’t taking advantage! She initiated everything, I promise. She practically pulled me into her flat and threw me on her bed, kissing me and climbing on top of me. I doubt I could have fought her off if I’d wanted to, not that I minded.”

That was true, Sasha thought as she wiped her face on her towel. She’d felt so empty and confused, and she’d wanted Tim to remember her properly.

“We had sex, and it was normal, and fine, I think,” Tim went on. “Her face was different, but I did remember her by the end. I remembered her in some way from when we’d had sex the very first time. So by the time we finished, I was feeling a lot better, and I guess I thought she must be too. I just wanted to lie there and hold her, but she got up—to go to the bathroom, I thought. All right, no red flags there. Most women hop up and go to the bathroom right after sex.”

Sasha returned, sitting back down opposite Jonathan. “I went to the kitchen instead, though,” she said. “I got a knife from the drawer—” She pointed to the bloody knife sitting on the counter. “—and I stabbed myself in the stomach.”

Everyone seemed to be holding their breath, watching her too intently. Sasha touched the spot above her navel, which still twinged faintly. She didn’t keep talking right away, despite Jonathan wordlessly compelling her to do so.

“Why?” Martin finally burst out. “Why’d you do it?!”

Sasha shrugged. “I felt… unreal. I was still operating under hallucination logic—you know when you’re in a dream and you do something perfectly logical, but upon waking up, you realize how silly or dangerous that would have been in real life? It was very much like that. I wanted the hallucination to change, or I wanted to be back with Helen or even Michael, where things had finally started making sense in their own way. I was…” Sasha wrestled with herself before giving into Jonathan’s pull and admitting what she’d really wanted. “I was lonely for Helen and Michael, I think. I wanted them to come back for me. And in a way, stabbing myself did work.”

“I mean, that’s one way of putting it,” Tim said grimly. “When I heard Sasha in the kitchen, I came out to see if she wanted a hand making a snack. I walked in just in time to see her plunge her knife into her stomach. I had just grabbed her phone to call an ambulance, when a door I don’t remember being next to the refrigerator opened.”

“It was Helen, of course,” Sasha said, trying not to smile. “She knelt next to me, because by that point I was on the floor with Tim holding me, and she said, ‘Silly Sasha,’ just like Michael always had. She said, ‘You could have just called for me.’ And that was about when I passed out.”

“That thing, ‘Helen,’ she pulled the knife out of Sasha’s stomach,” Tim continued for her. “It put its mouth to Sasha’s stomach and started licking the stab wound. I thought it was trying to drink Sasha’s blood, or eat her, or something else creepy, so obviously I tried to fight it off. But I suddenly looked at my hands and they were handcuffed. While I was trying to figure that out, Helen somehow fixed Sasha’s stab wound. Once I realized she was actually helping Sasha, I stopped freaking out. Sasha was waking up, and she didn’t seem to be in pain anymore, and she was  _ really   _ into what Helen was doing to her. I’ll admit, it was a little sexy to watch. Then Helen was done, and she kissed Sasha on the mouth. That woke Sasha up, and she just sort of… lay there, looking up at Helen.”

“I remember Helen stroked my cheek,” Sasha said. “And she said, ‘I would never, ever leave you, my Sasha. You are still marked as mine. I have loved feeding on your delicious, brave fear since I was Michael, and since Michael was me, and since I became Helen. Oh, silly, silly Sasha, to think I would ever truly let you go.’

Sasha bit her lip, drawing blood. She rubbed a coffee stain off the outside of her mug, quickly licking away the evidence of her sharp teeth. She was throbbing with lust and hunger and Jonathan’s compulsion, even though she didn’t really have anything else to tell. She was conditioned to orgasm for Michael and Helen both, and now they were one and the same, sort of, and that thought left her confused but incredibly aroused. She supposed “confused but incredibly aroused” described her life for most of the last year, really.

Basira finally broke the silence.

“Well, that’s not creepy at all,” she said wryly. “If you want, Daisy might be able to get a restraining order for you.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Tim said. “Anyway, she pretty much just got up and left after that. Back through that door, which you’ll notice is gone now. And Sasha got up, just like that, and made herself two sandwiches and a drank half a gallon of milk.”

“Near death experiences make me hungry,” Sasha protested.

“And I, being the only sane one in the building, apparently, called all of you in a gibbering panic to come over,” Tim concluded.

“Mmhmmmm,” Jonathan mused, rubbing his forehead. “I see. Statement ends.”

He didn’t turn the recorder off, though. They all sat there in another silence for a moment.

“Is it actually possible for another entity to claim an archival assistant?” Melanie asked. “I thought we all belonged to the All-Seeing-Asshole once we signed on?”

“I’m not certain,” Jonathan admitted. “Perhaps Sasha stopped counting as an archival assistant once she… disappeared from our plane of existence. Or perhaps The Spiral simply intends to frighten Sasha. We’ve all certainly been targeted by various entities.” He turned to Sasha and compelled her one last time. “You will let us know if you start developing superhuman abilities? Or if Helen pays you another visit?”

“Of course,” Sasha lied, enjoying the electric thrum through her body as she did so. “You’ll be the first to know.”

Jonathan sighed. “Well. It seems there’s nothing else for us to do here. I don’t feel right about leaving you alone, though. Perhaps we should have someone stay with you round-the-clock until you’re feeling totally… acclimated back to reality.”

Sasha knew that was a futile goal, but she simply nodded agreeably. “I suppose I wouldn’t mind some company. I don’t much care for being monitored at all times, though, even if we  _ are   _ loyal servants of The Eye.”

“I don’t care for that either,” Melanie declared. “And I’m hardly loyal to our asshole boss-god, so I’ll take first watch, if you please.”

“I can stay too,” Basira said. “Ladies night.”

That suited Sasha just fine. “Well, you heard them,” she said playfully. “It’s a ladies night now. Good night!”

“Clear out, gentlemen!” Melanie shooed the boys toward the door. “No boys allowed. We’re going to paint our nails and watch romcoms until the sun comes up. Very dull, very girly, so go away.”

“I actually like romantic comedies,” Martin protested, but he was summarily nudged out the door with Jonathan and Tim.

Once the door was locked behind them, Melanie and Basira joined Sasha at the table.

“All right, Sasha. Now that it’s just us.” Melanie looked Sasha straight in the eyes. “What the hell are you, exactly?”

Sasha smiled, showing off her slightly too-sharp teeth. “How did you know?”

“You’re taller than you used to be,” Melanie said. “And you don’t wear glasses anymore. And your curls were more of an S shape before, and now they’re spirals.”

Sasha grinned even more broadly, playing fondly with one of her long black ringlets. “I was hoping you’d see me as I really am.” Her smile disappeared. “Don’t tell the others, though. I… I’m not ready for them to know yet.”

“Because you have some secret plan to topple Elias and destroy the archives?” Melanie asked hopefully.

“No,” Sasha said. “At the risk of being struck down like Michael, it’s because I’m still mostly human, and I still want my friends to like me. I reckon I’m at least as human as Jon is. Maybe a bit more, even.”

“So you and Helen are both Michael’s replacement?” Basira asked. “There are two of you now? Would you be long and pointy if we looked at you through a juice glass?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Sasha said. “Helen’s not human at all anymore. I think she was the actual intended manifestation. But she wasn’t totally ready for it, she says, so I think a bit of the power overflowed into me since she was touching my skin. I can’t do very much. Yet, anyway. But I can fool Jon’s ability, if I feel like it, and I’m pretty sure I can trick Elias, too.”

“We’re missing the important point here,” Melanie said impatiently. “Can we use your ability to  _ stop   _ Elias?”

Sasha’s too-sharp smile returned. “I was so hoping you’d ask that. What do you two already know about The Watcher’s Crown?”  
  



End file.
